Despite Hung's obvious gifts as a filmmaker, he has ditched this raw immediacy in favor of a drifty, overstuffed, ultimately dull melodrama.
Norwegian Wood(ノルウェイの森)
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Japan · 2010
2h 13m
Director Tran Anh Hung
Starring Kenichi Matsuyama, Rinko Kikuchi, Kiko Mizuhara, Reika Kirishima
Genre Drama, Romance
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In 1960s Japan, high school student Toru Watanabe loses his only friend Kizuki after he commits suicide. Toru, now looking for a new life, enters a university in Tokyo. By chance, he meets Kizuki's ex-girlfriend, Naoko, in the university. However, as Toru and Naoko grow even closer, Naoko's sense of loss also grows.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
As a chronicle of grief and passion, however, the film is perilously close to being an exercise in tactile but touchy-feely passive-aggression.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
Fans of the book may resist the efforts of director Tran Anh Hung ("The Scent of Green Papaya"), simply because it would be impossible to capture the essence of Murakami's prose. But this exquisitely filmed, often haunting tragedy is worth taking on its own terms.
Admittedly lovely and heartfelt, Norwegian Wood is also hollow.
Lovely but listless.
Tran's visual precision is betrayed by his jumbled script, which fails to impose a cinematic structure on the source material.
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
The film has the loose narrative structure of a quasi-poetic personal journal that is more a series of reflections than a cohesive story.
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